WASHINGTON – Appearing on "Fox and Friends" on Monday morning, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said that The New York Times' 1619 Project was "a lie."

The 1619 Project is an effort by the Times to commemorate the 400th anniversary of slavery's beginning in America. The 1619 Project aims to "reframe the country's history, [understand] 1619 as our true founding, and [place] the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are."

Gingrich disagreed with the 1619 Project's interpretation of history, which included essays by New York Times writer Nikole Hannah-Jones, Princeton University sociologist Matthew Desmond and Harvard University professor Khalil Gibran Muhammad.

"The whole project is a lie," Gingrich said. "Look, I think slavery is a terrible thing. I think putting slavery in context is important. We still have slavery in places around the world today, so we recognize this is an ongoing story.

"Certainly if you're an African American, slavery is at the center of what you see as the American experience. But for most Americans, most of the time, there were a lot of other things going on," Gingrich said. "There were several hundred thousand white Americans who died in the Civil War in order to free the slaves."

Gingrich went on to compare The New York Times to Pravda, the Soviet propaganda newspaper, for what he saw as anti-Trump bias.

Hannah-Jones, who led the project, responded to similar criticism on Twitter from Gingrich on Sunday.